This movie has a lot going on upstairs.

Rating: 8/10 (10 September 2009)

Underneath the explosions and slo-mo camera, underneath the obligatory mugging of the lead couple, underneath the rather cheesy pop culture references, is a movie that has (perhaps accidentally) found something incredibly profound to say about society and the way we live. It got behind my eyes and made me wonder, which is not something you would expect from a Michael Bay movie.
So you all know the plot by now; in the near future, clones are grown in underground facilities as spare parts for their owners, and fed a story about the rest of the world being contaminated. The one thing that keeps them going is the dream of winning the lottery, where the prize is going off to live on The Island - a paradise, the only uncontaminated place left on Earth.
What is this saying about life for the average blue collar Joe? We are, essentially, spare parts for the ruling class. When we break, or become problematic, we get thrown away. The point of our very lives is to be ground up into the machine that services the super-rich. Everybody dreams of becoming rich themselves - winning the lottery of life - and getting to escape forever.
Or you can take the path of the hero, which involves getting smart and finding out the truth of this artificial prison - and the impossibility of winning life's lottery, perma-rigged by the owners.
Four years it has been since I saw this movie, and I still have trouble coming to terms with how true that message is. Will I ever 'win the Lottery' and get to escape from the death chosen for me at birth? The movie also manages to score a few surprisingly not-dumbed-down points about issues like stem cell research and the rights of the unborn. At one point, a character says "I want to live. And I don't care how." If living for another fifty years meant killing another man by shooting him yourself, few could bring themselves to do it. But what if the other man only existed because you created him, and he technically owes you his life as well? The film then throws us another curve ball by revealing that one clone's creator is in a coma, and unless the clone dies, the owner will too. Abortion for medical reasons, anybody? Does anyone under any circumstances have the right to decide if another lives or dies, especially if the the other has no voice? The movie then goes on to evolve the life-or-death scenario above with increasingly selfish reasons for killing your clone. Being able to live for another fifty years yourself is one that most people could eventually justify to themselves ... especially if the decision could be made on your deathbed. Using a clone to birth your baby because you are infertile yourself is an interesting one - could you warrant creating one new life by sacrificing another? But what about if you are a football player who needs new legs to save your career? Or a model who needs new younger-looking skin? At what point in the above scenarios do you draw the line? I give the movie additional points for ending with dual nods to the audience. Of course, the clones eventually find out the truth about their world and escape to freedom. But the fact that this scheme was allowed to go ahead in the first place, and that the movie deliberately sets itself very much in the real world, seems to suggest that if such a technology were to become available today ... then yes, people would do it. And they wouldn't care how.